With tent city cleared, no shortage of ideas — or homeless

1of 37Ashante Jones (left) and Leslie Roundtree remove their tent from Division Street before moving to a shelter Tuesday.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle

2of 37Jones pours oil into the trash as he clears out of the camp. “Are there enough places for us all to live in? Hell, no,” he says.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle

3of 37Leslie Roundtree (left) and husband Ashante Jones clear their belongings from Division Street on Tuesday as they move to the Mission Street Navigation Center.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / Photos by Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle

4of 37Department of Public Works employees throw a mattress into a garbage truck as they clean up trash left from the tent encampment on Division Street.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / Gabrielle Lurie / Special to The Chronicle

5of 37Larry Muraoka looks over a little flashlight outside his tent as homeless residents awaited a 72-hour deadline to leave the area around 13th Street and Division Street in San Francisco , Calif., on Wednesday, February 24, 2016,Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

6of 37Department of Public Works employees help Mike Francis (center), a homeless man, as he collects belongings with his companion Larry Muraoka (left), before being forced to move from Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

7of 37Department of Public Works employees haul an abandoned tent on Division Street in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

8of 37Larry Muraoka stands outside his tent before eating dinner as homeless residents awaited a 72-hour deadline to leave the area around 13th Street and Division Street in San Francisco , Calif., on Wednesday, February 24, 2016,Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

9of 37Oscar McKinney, left, stands by his tent as homeless residents awaited a 72-hour deadline to leave the area around 13th Street and Division Street in San Francisco , Calif., on Thursday, February 25, 2016.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

10of 37Joolie Coombes helps her homeless friend Leslie Roundtree (not pictured) clean up her tent before being forced out of the tent, on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

11of 37Department of Public Works employees haul an abandoned tent on Division Street in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

12of 37Oscar McKinney, left, stands by his tent as homeless residents awaited a 72-hour deadline to leave the area around 13th Street and Division Street in San Francisco , Calif., on Thursday, February 25, 2016.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

13of 37Department of Public Works employees pick up items left outside an abandoned tent on Division Street before throwing most of it in the trash, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

14of 37Leslie Roundtree, a homeless woman, is resisting leaving her tent on Division Street and instead lays in her bed, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 2, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

15of 37Department of Public Works employees look through an abandoned tent on Division Street before throwing it in the trash, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

16of 37Department of Public Works employees help Mike Francis (center), a homeless man, as he collects belongings with his companion Larry Muraoka (left), before being forced to move from Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

17of 37Leslie Roundtree, a homeless woman, is resisting leaving her tent on Division Street and instead lays in her bed, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 2, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

18of 37Leslie Roundtree (center), a homeless woman, removes her belongings from her tent on Division Street as she is forced to move from the tent encampments, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

19of 37Leslie Roundtree, a homeless woman, takes apart the rope that holds her tent together as she dismantles it, on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

20of 37Leslie Roundtree (left) and her husband Ashante Jones remove their belongings as they prepare to move from their tent on Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

21of 37Leslie Roundtree (right) and her husband Ashante Jones (left) remove their belongings as they prepare to move from their tent on Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

22of 37Leslie Roundtree (center) talks to a Department of Public Works employee (left) as she and her husband Ashante Jones (right) take down their tent as they prepare to move from Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

23of 37Leslie Roundtree (center) husband Ashante Jones (right) take down their tent as they prepare to move from Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

24of 37Ashante Jones( left) talks to a Homeless Outreach Team aid (who declined to give her name) as his wife Leslie Roundtree (right) comforted him, while they prepared to move from their tent on Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

25of 37Leslie Roundtree (right) husband Ashante Jones (left) dismantle their tent as they prepare to move from Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

26of 37Ashante Jones (left) and Leslie Roundtree (right) dismantle their tent as they prepare to move from Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

27of 37Leslie Roundtree removes her belongings from her tent as she prepares to move from her tent on Division Street to the navigation center, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

28of 37An abandoned tent on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

29of 37Department of Public Works employees haul an abandoned tent on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

30of 37A Department of Public Works employee photographs the interior of an abandoned tent, on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

31of 37Abandoned items are left outside a tent on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

32of 37Jeremy Harvell and a member of the Homeless Outreach Team (declined name) chat outside a tent while a police officer looks on, on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

33of 37(l-r) Joolie Coombes, Jeremy Harvell and a member of the Homeless Outreach Team are gathered outside a friends tent on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

34of 37Abandoned items are left outside a tent on Division Street, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

35of 37Department of Public Works employees pick up an abandoned tent on Division Street in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

36of 37A Department of Public Works employee power washes the sidewalk of Division Street after homeless people dismantled their tents and evacuated the area, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

37of 37A gallon of milk sits on the sidewalk next to the belongings of homeless man Jeremy Harvell (not pictured) who is preparing to move from the Division Street encampments, in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, March 1, 2016.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special to The Chronicle

As the final tent was tossed into a city truck last week to be hauled away from the biggest homeless camp ever assembled in San Francisco, its owner watched and shook his head with a weariness pounded into him by too many years on the street.

“This won’t solve anything,” said 39-year-old Ashante Jones. “Sure, some people like me are going into shelters, but everyone else just moved around the corner. Are there enough places for us all to live in? Hell, no.

“This s— needs to change. But nobody knows how.”

Jones is at least half right.

Now that the 250-plus people camping along Division Street under busy Highway 101 have been cleared from the sidewalk and business owners can breathe sighs of relief, two immense questions are left hovering in the air: What next? And why can’t the homeless problem be solved?

For now, this much is clear: The few hundred tent dwellers evicted were a veritable thimble’s worth of the total 3,500 people who bed down along the sidewalks and alleys of San Francisco every night, and getting rid of the encampment on Division does virtually nothing to solve that. Most people’s attention will go back to the typical irritation of daily homelessness in San Francisco, the city’s $241 million worth of programs will churn on and, in all likelihood, San Francisco’s total homeless population will remain stubbornly at the 6,500-person level it’s been stuck at for nearly a decade.

The paradox of San Francisco’s seemingly intractable homeless problem, local and national experts say, is that there is no shortage of ideas for how to fix the mess. Many, in fact, are proven successes, both here and elsewhere. And the brightest hope may be on the city’s horizon: the department of homelessness the mayor plans to have in place this year, which seeks to streamline all relevant programs under one roof.

Strong leadership needed

The biggest challenge for that yet-to-be launched department is combining housing, counseling, street outreach and other services in one place without too much infighting and duplication, then securing the government funding needed to take its programs to scale. No one at City Hall wants to estimate what that level of funding will have to be.

“The idea of a single homeless department has some good potential. It could truly unify the departments that are now spread around without the focus to really win it, really end homelessness,” said Art Agnos, who in the 1980s became the first San Francisco mayor to craft a sweeping program to tackle the problem — and was then excoriated as a huge homeless camp swelled at Civic Center.

“But a department like that will only work if put together with strong leadership and strong personnel,” he said. “And the trouble is that bureaucracies hate to give up power and resources, so they give their castoffs.

“What this will require is first-stringers,” Agnos said. “Anything less, and it will fail.”

In effect, what San Francisco has been trying to do for the past decade with programmatic adjustments and its “10 Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness” — an effort that expired in 2014 well short of its goal — is close to what Agnos came up with in 1989.

His Beyond Shelter plan envisioned two multipurpose centers that would bring in homeless people and process them into housing and the counseling they would need to stay stable, a concept that later became widely known as supportive housing. Those centers were not unlike the popular Navigation Center San Francisco created last year, which takes in street campers and gives them beds while they are routed relatively rapidly into housing or provided voluntary return trips to their original homes.

But after Agnos’ term in office ended, successor Frank Jordan put the city’s emphasis on his police-heavy Matrix program, with officers cracking down on homeless behavior in the street. Mayor Willie Brown, who followed Jordan, returned the focus to building supportive housing units, but the Agnos plan by then had faded. Billions of dollars eliminated from national affordable housing and poverty-aid programs in the 1980s and early 1990s were never restored, undermining each mayor’s efforts. The two multipurpose centers became standard shelters instead of counseling and placement centers.

‘The problem is us’

One still bears an echo of the Agnos plan in its name: Multi-Service Center South. It’s the largest homeless shelter in San Francisco, holding 380 people a night.

“The trouble is that homelessness has developed so much over the years that it’s become accepted,” said Don Stannard-Friel, author and sociology professor at Notre Dame de Namur University, who studies poverty and homelessness in San Francisco. “People living in cardboard boxes under a freeway — until the 1980s we hadn’t had that since the Depression. Now it’s considered normal for my students.

“We have to change our attitude. The problem is us.”

San Francisco has created programs that have become national models, chief among them the Navigation Center at 16th and Mission streets, and the city Public Health Department’s Direct Access to Housing complexes with on-site doctors. It’s also successfully moved about 22,000 homeless people off the street since 2004, largely through initiatives pushed hard by former Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Success in other cities

Elsewhere, other new techniques are also showing promise, and San Francisco’s policy leaders are paying close attention.

In Seattle and Portland, villages of tents and tiny houses augmented by visiting counselors have housed thousands of homeless people in recent years, and Sacramento and Sonoma County are considering following suit. In New York, the Breaking Ground nonprofit has built hundreds of tiny apartments, averaging about 250 square feet, for the homeless, stretching scarce housing dollars by more than half.

Seven cities, including Philadelphia and New Orleans, have ended veterans’ homelessness by leveraging extra federal dollars for ex-military personnel into housing and counseling. San Francisco is near that goal as well. Salt Lake City and Houston both ended street homelessness more than a year ago by routing people quickly through their own, more diffused, versions of navigation centers and creating enough supportive housing to take in everyone.

The main obstacles in San Francisco, many experts have long agreed, are the ever-escalating costs of housing and of providing drug rehab, mental and other crucial services for the poor in a city where everything is expensive; and the sometimes crippling political process that new ideas, such as tent villages, and new funding for anything have to go through.

As it is, nearly half of the $241 million the city spends each year on homelessness goes to what is essentially a de-facto housing project — keeping more than 11,100 formerly homeless people in permanent supportive housing. So initiatives for spiriting new people out of the gutter are not even a small part of that funding total.

Where to place people?

One of the most promising innovations in years for helping the homeless off the street, say most observers, including President Obama’s homeless-policy advisers, has been the Navigation Center. But though 259 people have been housed since its opening a year ago — and it’s become a plum destination for those on the street — there aren’t enough units available to house significantly more quickly.

Mayor Ed Lee allocated $3 million last year to create another Navigation Center. City officials, including Supervisor David Campos, have called for as many as six more to be created. Tensions over continuing complaints of street behavior all over the city have made the desire for those centers so urgent that Campos erupted angrily last week when Sam Dodge, the mayor’s point man on homelessness, said at a public session that it will be at least six months before another can be built.

“I think it’s outrageous that we are talking about six months,” Campos said. “And it’s unacceptable. I know I am not going to be OK with that.”

Dodge didn’t claim to be OK with it either. “I understand the urgency as well,” he said. “I have been walking those same streets. It is heartbreaking to say the least, and shameful.”

Bringing techniques to scale

Richard Cho, one of President Obama’s top advisers on homelessness, told The Chronicle that the techniques for ending homelessness are now proven — housing people quickly and surrounding them with counseling for jobs, mental health care, drug rehab and other services. “But the problem is bringing them to scale,” he said.

“What we are seeing in large encampments like San Francisco’s across the nation, but prominently in the Southern and Western states, is just the latest symptom in the problem of homelessness that needs to be addressed more aggressively,” said Cho, deputy director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. “The reason there hasn’t been enough progress recently is the lack of federal support. We have pushed for more funding, but Congress has resisted.”

With income inequity in America is at its highest level in a century, homelessness in recent years has only grown. An Urban Institute study last year showed that nationally, there are only 29 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income households. According to a report released last month by the National Center for Children in Poverty, nearly half of all American children live near or below the poverty line.

Obama’s 2017 budget plan calls for $330 million to add 25,500 supportive housing units nationally — the biggest such request in many years — which Cho said could end chronic homelessness if combined with refinements in the existing housing stock.

“It is not a bottomless pit of resources that we need,” he said. “Ending homelessness is a doable thing.”

Saving cash through care

Funneling more money toward a long-standing problem is always a two-sided argument, but a key economic comparison touted for years is that leaving a chronically homeless person on the street costs about $60,000 a year in police, hospital and other emergency services, while keeping that person in supportive housing costs about $20,000.

Homeless advocates have been pointing out the economic benefit of housing people rather than letting them suffer outside since they helped Agnos write his Beyond Shelter plan in 1989. These days they get little argument from city policy managers on that account. And at least for the moment, even as they denounce the sweeps by city crews and police that cleared out Division Street, advocates think the lingering sense of distress over the sprawling tent city will attract new attention to solutions.

“I actually feel like things are shifting now, that there might be some progress ahead,” Jennifer Friedenbach, head of the Coalition on Homelessness, said as she monitored the last tent removals on Division. “San Franciscans are really pissed off at this camp and how it was handled, and I think they really want the city to do something different. And that’s always good to talk about.

“A sustained revenue source for more housing, an emergency system that responds rapidly — none of this is new. It just requires the will to make it happen.”

Kevin Fagan is a longtime reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle. He specializes in enterprise news-feature writing and breaking news, taking particular pleasure in ferreting out stories others might not find — from profiling the desperate lives of homeless drug addicts to riding the rails with hobos, finding people who sleep in coffins and detailing the intricacies of hunting down serial killers.

From 2003 to 2006, Kevin was the only beat reporter in the United States covering homelessness full time. He has witnessed seven prison executions and has covered many of the biggest breaking stories of our time, from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero and the Columbine High School massacre to Barack Obama’s election as president, the deadly Mendocino Complex, Wine Country and Ghost Ship fires and the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains a special focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition.

He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Jose State University and was raised in California and Nevada.